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By at least one yardstick — the growth of personal income — it is possible to see the 1970s as a prosperous time in Canada. By almost any other measure, the country was lucky to get out of the sickly '70s more or less intact.
The prosperity case is made by historians Jack Granatstein and Robert Bothwell in their 2000 book Our Century: "Canadians in the 1970s were better off than they ever had been before — matching Americans in terms of average incomes for the only time in Canadian history." Sadly, however, inflation played counteractive havoc with their cited 55% growth of average incomes through the 10 years to 1975.
Stagflation — stagnation of national economic activity along with inflation of costs and prices — stalked the country much of that time. In 1975, the year that a federal Anti-Inflation Board set up shop, the economy receded, with unemployment rising to almost 7% of the labor force.
Adding to the pressures on workaday Canada were the ripping of the social and political fabric. There are echoes to this day of the decade's divisive regionalism, the mean-minded kind that cramps commerce as it soils politics and turns social discourse sour. Take the example from the familiar dustup this past spring when the premiers of Alberta and Ontario butted into Ottawa's exclusive right to conduct foreign relations by formally informing the Americans that they objected to Canada's stand against the invasion of Iraq. Their federal counterpart fired back. So Albertans discussed building a constitutional "firewall' against the feds. It all sounded like the same old, same old.
Except that the regionalism of the 1970s seemed more menacing to the country's survival. The decade was barely beginning when the Quebec brand of political parochialism turned truly dangerous. There had been a spell of terrorist bombings by Quebec separatists in Montreal, targets ranging from mailboxes to the stock exchange. Next came the October Crisis of 1970 — the kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross and the murder of Quebec labor and immigration minister Pierre Laporte, which prompted Ottawa to suspend civil rights and call out the army.
Next came the "oil shocks" of 1973 and 1979, when world prices exploded — by more than tenfold by the end of the decade. Alberta sought to cash in with more exports, and Ottawa tried to insulate Canadians from the inflated fuel costs. Apart from driving motorists out of gas guzzlers into compact cars and a federal program subsidizing the increased insulation of homes, the result was a lasting bitterness between Alberta and the rest of the country.
The price shocks killed the National Oil Policy, under which consumers west of the Ottawa River formed a captive market and paid premium prices to Alberta producers. They also led to the Trudeau government's National Energy Program, designed to prevent higher-priced US markets from siphoning off everything Alberta could pump out and to insulate Canada from the worst of world costs. The bickering spawned bumper stickers in Alberta that offered to "Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark!"
In counterpoint to the 1970s' divisive forces, a nationalist reaction reinforced official anxiety about the vast proportions of Canada owned by foreigners, mostly Americans. That included all of Ontario's automakers and almost all of Alberta's petroleum business. The heavyweight alien control appeared graphically in an article designed to dispel "fuzzy thinking" on foreign ownership in this magazine's issue of September 1970. It showed the percentages of key Canadian industries owned or controlled abroad ranging from almost 57% of manufacturing and close to 61% of mining, to about 83% of Canada's oil and gas wells. Ottawa's response was first, in 1971, the Canada Development Corp., to put money into domestic ventures. Then, in 1974, the Foreign Investment Review Agency came into operation, which turned out to be not much of a barrier to takeovers as long as they promised to create jobs.
The kind of cross-border and transatlantic business that sounded happier notes included Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Rompin' Ronnie Hawkins' The Band, all providing accompaniment to such spillover fashions and fads from the late 1960s as the miniskirt, the unisex bell-bottom pants and the turtlenecks that supplanted the tie. And helping out against inflation was the early-boomer expansion of the number of double-income families or partnerships — even the DINK (Double Income, No Kids) idea.
As for surfacing from the decade's sea of troubles, that, too, was a bit of same old, same old. It was novelist Margaret Atwood who published a reminder in her 1972 book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature that the capacity of the Canadian to surmount difficulties is what this country has always been all about.
Excerpts from Canadian Business
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